As the pervasiveness of the Internet has grown, sellers of goods and services predictably have attempted to reach consumers using the Internet and thereby increase their business. At a base level, brick and mortar retailers launched informational websites providing details about their businesses and/or products. Over time, e-commerce websites were launched and increasingly frequented by consumers who purchased goods or services through the websites. In an attempt to increase the traffic to their respective websites, many online retailers place advertisements such as banner advertisements and flash-based advertisements on other websites that potential customers may visit. For example, advertisements are often placed on news websites and on websites used to access free email accounts. The advertisements typically allow a user to click on the advertisement, or a link located therein, to proceed to the website of the advertising company.
Conventional Internet advertising suffers from several drawbacks. For example, Internet users may now have grown accustomed to and therefore may habitually ignore conventional forms of internet advertising such as banner ads and the like. Furthermore, even if a user who is accessing his email or reading a news article notices a banner ad or similar advertisement, he may decide to avoid the inconvenience of transitioning to a new web page by not clicking on the advertisement, even where he has some interest in the product or store described by the advertisement. To overcome these problems, it would be useful to provide a module in high traffic areas at the center of an Internet user's attention (e.g. in a Facebook user's news feed) that allows an Internet user to complete a transaction, such as a purchase, without navigating away from the webpage on which the user encountered the module (e.g. the Facebook user's news feed).